This specification generally relates to visual recognition within images, and more particularly to visual recognition of logos within images.
Logos provide an important visual form of identification of commercial brands and/or economic or academic entities. Building a system that is able to recognize logos requires the knowledge of a large set of logo names and an appearance model that corresponds to each logo name. Manual or human-supervised collection of such information is laborious and inefficient.
Although data mining techniques have been proposed for other object categories (e.g., faces, landmarks), these techniques are not readily applicable to logos. In particular, there are substantial differences between logos and such other object categories. For example, automatic learning of face models depends on face detection, whereas general logo detection is not feasible. As another example, the data source of landmark model learning mainly consists of web photo galleries with geographical or content tags, which is not applicable to logos as well.